Welcome

The workshop will focus on the range of emerging approaches within e-science, community engagement in dialogue knowledge input/review or assessment, science blogs, and authenticated wiki-like research discussions and analysis, as well as the potential to formalize such community level contributions. These new approaches to communication are becoming important for biology as biological scientists attempt to address the inherent complexity of life, manage both high information content and high throughput data streams, and employ the opportunities emerging from advances in e-communication/networking and information technology. In part, this meeting has been stimulated by the success of the PSI KB Annotation Workshop, and by the general need within research both in metagenomics and structural genomics to understand the changing means of scientific communication and how we can best reach out to the community and have our work be enhanced in timely impact. The general case of getting input to genomic data from the entire community, third party annotation and not from only the original provider, is another driver for the need to extend communication beyond traditional publications, but the transformations in scientific dialogue / communication are much broader than just that within the genome community.